CONSIDERING OUR CANCEL CULTURE
Love the art, hate the artist? A popular Chicago college class has been fighting this culture war for years
Eileen Favorite has heard the word “problematic” more than any person should have to hear any word repeated, again and again. She has heard it applied to the obvious and to the unexpected. She has heard people say “problematic” so often that when she says it herself, the word doesn’t come as casually as it does for her students. It’s become an event. It bold-faces. It goes ALL CAPS. Sometimes it sounds like a chuckle. Sometimes like a death sentence. Sometimes it has an eye-roll attached. Sometimes an indictment.
The point being, when Eileen Favorite discusses the life and work of problematic artists with her students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one size refuses to fit all.
“OK, now who can think of an artist whose life is entirely separate from their work,” she asked the class on a recent winter morning, playing devil’s advocate, as she often does.
No one spoke.
“And that’s our problem, isn’t it?” For 20 years now, long before the #MeToo movement, ages before the #OwnVoices movement, when Harvey Weinstein was still feared, Kanye West was still about the music, and museums exhibited portfolios of amoral behavior with impunity, Favorite has toiled in the cancel culture. Indeed, before it was called cancel culture, she’s been considering our cancel culture. Since 2001, Favorite, a Chicago-based novelist and literature professor, has taught a class at SAIC titled “Love the Art, Hate the Artist.” The university describes it as a course on the recurring question: “How do the biographical details of an artist’s life influence our attitude toward their work?” But as one student said, “It’s really more like a course on how to be an artist and still be a good human.” Naturally, it’s a minefield. “When I started teaching this class, I had a room full of art students who didn’t want to pass judgment on anyone who called themselves an artist,” Favorite told me. “Just a decade ago, they forgave everything. I had to teach them how to take a stand against anyone. Now it’s the complete opposite. Lately though, maybe it’s swinging back again.”
Favorite has watched the zeitgeist through her students for so long, the students used to make fun of Michael Jackson; when he died they defended him; now they mostly condemn him. She talks about cancel culture with a combination of alarm, respect and long perspective. A few years ago, when I began sitting in on her class, I saw a
pattern: Students often started the semester with hard-line judgments — Picasso was a rapist, singer Chris Brown is an abuser, et al. The work of some artists was too “dangerous” for “others.” Labeling “problematic” art works was suggested. But within weeks, many students were arguing in shades of gray, allowing for nuance, even a little forgiveness.
If you think of an art school as one of the front lines of this country’s perpetual culture wars, Favorite’s students are those rarest of participants — they walk the middle ground.
On a Zoom class in February, soon after the spring semester started, her students were discussing Chester Himes, known for his authentically gritty Harlem detective stories and ’40s noir. He also spent almost a decade in jail for armed robbery. He died in 1984. Favorite prefers dead artists in the class — you can see the full shape of a career, and a person. Which is helpful, because conversations in “Love the Art, Hate the Artist” get so knotty and broad, it gets hard to know when someone is referencing the artist or the art.
“Is it important we trust that Himes knows the world he’s writing about?” Favorite asked.
A student said she was more inclined to trust Himes than “F. Scott Whatshisname.” Himes was in jail. Himes was airing details of systemic racism before we had a phrase for it. Favorite followed: OK, so is it important a writer only write about those of a similar background? In an earlier class she asked if Himes “was a bad person and do we have the right to say who is a bad person?”
A student asked her for a baseline bad person.
“Hitler,” Favorite said. “But who is super good? And don’t say Gandhi.”
Malala, a student shouted, meaning the Pakistani activist.
“Oh, I bet Malala has a dark side,” Favorite said.
Himes is more in the middle, a student said.
Yes, Favorite said, maybe, but that depends on your definition of middle, and bad. “For a long, long time, artists didn’t have to live by the same moral code as the rest of society,” she said, laying down a contextual foundation. “We apologized for bad behavior as the cost of masterpieces. Now we draw a line. But where do you draw a line? Are you an apologist? Think about this. You will need to. The rest of the world is.”
Any history of culture, you might say, is partly a history of jerks, of selfishness and worse often defended in the service of masterpieces, of great artists held above all else. Which is not an original idea, of course. The old math goes like: Great art makes the world better, therefore the cost of a great artist’s lousy behavior — neglected families, steamrolled subjects, plagiarism, abuse — is never too steep. Great works are valued more than the unhappiness of a handful. But naturally, nothing is so simple. One of Favorite’s go-to examples is James Joyce. She remembers, as a student, her own professor at SAIC telling her Joyce believed his writing came before everything else, including earning enough to put food on the table for his children. “I remember thinking, ‘OK, so am I not selfish enough to be great?’ Good people can make good things, too?”
Our new calculus is more like: Purging the problematic artist is a small price in the service of doing the morally correct thing, which then allows room for the art of the steamrolled. Except, again, nothing is so simple. Despite what you’ve heard about cancel culture, there is no zero-sum outcome. As the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr once wrote, squaring good Cosby with bad: “We all agreed on Bill Cosby. We all pretty much agree on him now, for entirely different reasons.” Someday we may reconcile our two Cosbys. But not for a while.
Which is particularly tough arithmetic for an art student.
“A part of the experience of art school is understanding where you can cross the line,” said Vanessa Payne, an SAIC sophomore currently in Favorite’s class. “Controversy in contemporary art is a part of your education, so figuring out that line and what it looks like is also part of the art world. Eileen gives us a comfortable space to discuss this.”
The class, usually, is about 20 students, many of them female. The majority, Favorite assumes, stand firmly to the left ideologically, this being an art school and all. Yet at times their arguments, in a different era, might have been sounded pretty conservative.
During one class I attended, Favorite held up a copy of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.” “There is attempted rape in this book. I might say I’m not letting my kids read it. But should it have a label: ‘This writer is problematic, this work is potentially offensive’?”
Is that so wrong? a student asked.
So just let labels dictate what is problematic? Favorite asked.
Well, it doesn’t have to be a big label, the student said.
Favorite visibly cringed and moved on.
As a writer herself, the discussion left her unsettled. Then again, that same student later told me that Favorite was her best teacher, that no one was a smarter navigator of the “cognitive dissonance” in art school. Indeed, across the three semesters I dipped in and out of the course, student arguments for problematic behavior — why Hemingway is an monster, why Tarantino is a racist, et al — sometimes sounded like Comedy Central’s “Drunk History,” muddled, contradictory, yet full of insights. Their stumbling didn’t make them wrong. It just sounded like learning. Favorite would tell them, as a writer, she likes conflict, “but your tweet, and the tweets of 3,000 others, are not evidence in this class.”
Neither is vague insinuation, an online impression or conventional wisdom alone.
Favorite told me later: “I’m not really interested in (the students) being right or wrong about an artist. I’m interested in having them think for themselves and wrestle with their conclusions. The more they unpack, the more they often realize just how ambivalent they are. A lot of them really end up with very idiosyncratic reasons for how they decide if an artist is worthy or not.” Class after class, the issues arrived in a flood: Who gets to say an artist should be removed from a museum? If they are canceled, so to speak, is it for economic or moral reasons? Should we impose contemporary standards on artists decades removed from us? Can a work be “such a gift” it outweighs years of abuse?
Among the ways that she asks her students to answer these questions is by selecting a single artist to explore over the length of the course; then, by the end of the semester, they apply the title of the class: Do they love the art, hate the artist now? Or vice versa?
The day they decide their artists plays at times like a parody of cancel culture, each of the students telling Favorite who they will profile and the artist’s perceived offenses. A couple of semesters ago, for instance, students picked Eminem (cultural appropriation), Dr. Seuss (racism), William S. Burroughs (shot his wife), RuPaul (doesn’t take gender seriously enough), painter Will Cotton. “And what’s wrong with Cotton?” Favorite asked.
“I heard he’s a jerk?” the student said.
“We want evidence in this class,” Favorite said.
“Can we argue an artist wants to be a better person?” another student asked.
“So, you love the artist, love the work,” Favorite said. She noted that a student in a previous semester admired Lewis Carroll only to learn the author of “Alice in Wonderland” had a long, questionable history with children. “The sweet spot is that you like the work and the person is a jerk.” Uncomfortable conclusions mean real work.
Certainly, there’s no shortage of bad history to choose from.
Norman Mailer stabbed his wife, Caravaggio was a murderer, Virginia Woolf was anti-Semitic, Hitchcock treated his female actors like cattle. To name just a handful of notorious acts and accusations. “If we went to the Art Institute alone and took down the work of artists who have committed heinous acts, those walls would be bare,” said Amy Mooney, an associate professor of art history at Columbia College. Yet, as central as morality can be to understanding an artist, a class on the subject is rare. At Columbia, it’s seen “as inherently part of art’s history.” Likewise, Jennifer Prewitt-Freilino, who teaches psychology at Rhode Island School of Design, said they don’t teach the subject per se, but rather ethics and identity, which dovetails at times into forgiveness: “I think a lot about the potential of restorative justice. Do we allow artists to make amends? When it’s an artist dead a long time, what then? Can there be some meaningful path forward?”
Favorite had the idea for the class after a frustrating conversation with a friend.
“She said she could never read a poet she knew was not a nice person. She was the kind of person with a high moral code and firm sense of what she would and would not do. Argue with her all day long, she still kept a very clear line. I remember thinking, ‘OK, I don’t know if I want to have dinner with Hemingway. But I like “The Sun Also Rises.” ’
“I remember when Eileen proposed the class,” said Lisa Wainwright, a professor in department of art history, theory and criticism at SAIC, and former dean of faculty. “You have a student body thinking about ethics and needing to unpack race, gender, nationhood. Foregrounding the hard stuff just makes so much sense. You have to marvel at how prescient Eileen was to she come up with it years ago — and also how brave she is to do it right now.”
Favorite herself has been so concerned at times with students taking an offense at the necessarily provocative discussions she leads in “Love the Art, Hate the Artist” that the course description in the school catalog comes with a content warning. She worries about being attacked as insensitive for incorporating insensitive material. Students in her classes often request trigger warnings on some of the books she’s included in the class. (Jerzy Kosinksi’s “The Painted Bird” has been a sore spot). In another course she teaches on Jane Austen, a student recently said that they couldn’t come up with a paper about the 19thcentury novelist because Austen’s books were too “heteronormative.”
Favorite relays this, however, with a matter-offactness, even some admiration.
Students are bolder these days, she said, willing to say what bothers them. And that’s a good thing. “Overall, it’s progress. Still, the front line gets confusing,” she said.
There is no actual authority on how to teach or wrestle with the bad behavior of artists. There is no baseline. Contradictions are constant. Claire Dederer, who teaches nonfiction writing at Pacific University in Oregon, is writing a book for Knopf on what we do with the art of monstrous men. “I can’t pretend to completely know or understand the truth” behind the allegations made against artists, she said. At the same time, “I can’t watch, say, Woody Allen without thinking about his history. Though when I talk to undergrads about this, there is often a moral absolute-ism.”
Favorite’s class can sound something like this, paired with a stumbling-toward-enlightenment quality. Her students “constantly make me aware of my blind spots.” Their language, in classes I attended, was often lockstep, and professionally polite, almost business-speak. When she created the class no one said “problematic,” requested a contextual “lens,” or referred to “white supremacy.” Now it’s the lexicon. At the same time, though the university prefers students make firm arguments in their papers, Favorite said, her own classes often shed their rigidity for conversations full of ambivalence. She commends the vulnerability.
A couple of semesters ago, then-junior Pascale Jarvis explained it this way: “I guess I base a lot of ( judgments) off gut instinct, which is what you do in your 20s, right? Eileen has helped clarify my thoughts. This era is P.C., and I think that’s important, but before this class I understated my opinion, and didn’t step on toes. I put an asterisk on things. I feel I have more to say now, I have evidence. I see nothing in black and white.”
Favorite grew up in South Holland, second-generation Irish, eighth child in a household of nine kids. “Which just forces you to see a lot of points on view on everything, like always. There are so many personalities and idiosyncrasies, you have to entertain ideas.” Going to parochial school, having a strong Catholic background, she was steeped in the old mantra: Love the sinner, hate the sin. “It was an all-girls Catholic school and it might surprise you, there was a class called ‘Morality’ that allowed us to speak very freely. Ms. Kelly, the teacher, she didn’t want to just hear the Catholic line on stuff. You would hear a student say, ‘I don’t think premarital sex is so wrong,’ and that would get, ‘Oh, OK, why not?’ Then that became a conversation. Which stuck with me.”
Favorite received her MFA in writing at SAIC, and later authored a clever 2008 novel, “The Heroines,” about a fabled Illinois retreat for tragic female protagonists of classic literature, such as Madame Bovary and Scarlett O’Hara. She also has been an adjunct professor at SAIC for two decades; last year she won its Excellence in Teaching award.
For a while, “Love the Art, Hate the Artist” was a course in search of a zeitgeist.
Which happened in 2017, with the election of Donald Trump and the rise of #MeToo. After that, the course often had a wait list to get in. It gained a newfound urgency. As many of the students who took the class told me, it became a trusted space for the contradictory feelings that don’t always play well to the orthodoxy of Twitter and university campuses.
Belle Hulne, who took the class as a sophomore, told me that, as an artist herself, on the cusp of a career: “I would sit in the class sometimes wondering what’s controversial in my own past. Did I ever post anything online that could be read a certain way? I look back at some of the video blogs I used to do and think, I feel like 180 degrees from that now. How could my life be picked apart? People do assume that you are your persona.”
That question — of whether your work is you and you are your work, regardless of how much you change — recurs frequently. The more it’s asked, the more evasive the certainty of a firm answer. Favorite often begins with the art alone, removed from the bad behavior of the artist, then gradually veers into the trouble, forcing students to reconcile competing feelings. Grades are based mostly on papers and a series of “Love/Hate” debates staged during class. Before the debates, Favorite asks the students to pick a slip of paper from a hat, which tells them if they are for or against an artist. This can lead to a lot of uneasiness. Along with fresh feelings of empathy or accountability.
But really, grade-wise, the conversation is the thing.
One discussion I heard began with “The Catcher in the Rye”; moved off onto J.D. Salinger’s relationships with women far younger than himself; touched on whether war trauma excuses excesses; brought up the trouble with nostalgia; considered R. Kelly; considered Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting of Emmett Till; and ended on whether or not HBO should have scrubbed itself of Louis C.K. Someone connected this back to Salinger — is buying his books perpetuated “problematic” ideas about privilege and young people that “don’t need any oxygen in the 21st century”? Someone else said the question reminded them of Kevin Spacey — if we give him screen time again, isn’t it the same as giving him power? Yet, countered another student, a lot of us spend money on Amazon, despite knowing that many of its employees say they are badly treated.
“No one should have iPhones,” a student said plainly, seriously.
“But really how much burden can we take on?” Favorite asked.
Their rabbit holes go deep.
Sessions run over, meander, tangle, knot, unease. Can you still listen to Kanye West? Is it OK to hate Andy Warhol for appropriation? Can you read infidelity into the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright? A conversation about Sylvia Plath veers into whether she’s too iconic and abstract now as a person to be judged by her suicide. Favorite stepped in: “Ever wonder if the right answer to a question in this class is, ‘Is it any of my business’?” Nods all around. “Ever wonder if the best art can be simply a gift to us — Plath was describing what depression is like. She’s awful sometimes, she’s super difficult. She also gave us a gift.” Now shrugs all around. Favorite smirked: “You’re saying she’s too messy as a person for her work to rise above her actions?” Silence.
More silence. Favorite cocked her hip and asked it in a different way: “OK, who here likes a mess?”